Devil’s Claw

CHAPTER 17

By seven-thirty the next morning, Joanna was driving Jenny to school. “You’re awfully quiet this morning,” Joanna said. “What’s going on?”

“Did you like them?”

“Who?”

“Did you like Butch’s parents?” Jenny asked.

After years of telling her daughter that honesty was the best policy, Joanna decided a truthful answer was the best option. “Not very much,” she admitted.

“Me, either,” Jenny replied. “Mrs. Dixon seems really mean, and Mr. Dixon… well, he kept asking me all kinds of dumb questions. You know, the kind of questions grown-ups ask kids when they think they have to talk to them but they really don’t have anything to say.”

“I agree. They were both pretty annoying,” Joanna said. “But remember, they say you can choose your friends, but you’re stuck with your relatives.”

“They’re not our relatives,” Jenny declared.

“They will be,” Joanna told her daughter grimly. “Since they’re Butch’s relatives, they’re going to end up being our relatives, too. We’ll just have to do our best to figure out a way to get along with them.”

“Okay,” Jenny said, nodding. “But I’m not going to like them any better.”

For the next few minutes, mother and daughter rode in silence. Finally, Joanna tackled another topic. “What about Clayton’s funeral?” she asked. “Have you made up your mind yet about whether or not you’re going to go?”

Jenny nodded. “I want to go,” she said. Then, after a pause, she added, “No, that’s not true. I don’t want to go, but I’m going anyway. Clayton was my friend-our friend-and I want to be there.”

“Good girl,” Joanna said. “I’ll call the school from my office and let them know that I’ll be by to pick you up at one-thirty. Since the funeral’s scheduled for two, that should be plenty of time.”

Only after Jenny jumped out of the Blazer and slammed the door did Joanna let her mind focus on her scheduled coming-to-God meeting with Kristin Marsten and Terry Gregovich. She had watched the blossoming romance between her secretary and the K-9 officer with amused tolerance. As long as they had remained discreet about it and hadn’t let their relationship get in the way of work, she had been willing to go along with it. Her department had no hard and fast rules about fraternizing between officers and staff as long as there was no inappropriate relationship between supervisors and reporting employees and as long as the relationship didn’t interfere with the performance of respective duties.

Clearly, though, what had happened the day before was anything but discreet. Joanna knew all about young love. After all, she was in love herself. She didn’t like being forced into taking a hard-nosed position, but as an elected administrator, it was her job to supervise her employees and see to it that they maintained a clear-cut line between love and duty. If Kristin and Terry weren’t prepared to function with a suitable degree of separation between their professional and personal lives, then, as sheriff, Joanna had to be prepared to demand someone’s resignation.

At the Cochise County Justice Complex, Joanna parked the Blazer in her reserved spot. As she stepped out of the SUV, she paused long enough to glance around the lot. It was only five of eight, but she noticed that both Kristin’s red Geo and Terry’s blue four-by-four were already in the parking lot. They were parked side by side in the farthest corner of the farthest row. So much for maintaining any kind of discretion.

Shaking her head, Joanna used the electronic keypad to let herself directly into her corner office through a private entrance-one that avoided her having to traverse the public lobby areas. Once in her office, she straightened her desk before squaring her shoulders and walking over to open the door that led to the outer reception area. A pale-faced, stricken Kristin sat at her desk. There were dark circles under her eyes, which were puffy and red. Across from her, Terry Gregovich sat on the waiting-room-style love seat, with Spike curled comfortably at his feet. The K-9 officer sat still and straight in his chair, his arms folded across his chest.

“You’d better come on in,” Joanna announced to them. “Let’s get this over with.”

Kristin entered Joanna’s private office first, followed by Terry and the dog. The two people sat on the captain’s chairs across from Joanna’s desk. As soon as Terry was seated, Spike circled three times and then settled in comfortably at his handler’s feet. For a time, no one spoke.

“Well,” Joanna said at last. “Would anyone care to explain exactly what went on around here yesterday afternoon and why you both seem to have gone AWOL at the same time?”

“I will,” Terry said.

“No, let me,” Kristin interrupted. “It was my fault. I’m the one who took off from work without really being sick. And I’m the one who told Terry that I had to see him no matter what-that we had to talk.”

“Don’t listen to her, Sheriff Brady,” Terry said. “It isn’t either her fault. I’m a big boy. I knew better than to turn off my pager, but I did it because I didn’t want to be interrupted even though I had a feeling Spike and I might be needed again yesterday. If anyone deserves to be in trouble over this, I’m the one.”

At the sound of his name, Spike raised his head, looked up, and thumped his bushy tail on the floor. When no orders were forthcoming, however, he sighed, put his head back down on his front paws, and closed his eyes once more.

Joanna sighed. “All right then,” she said. “What was it that you needed to discuss that was so all-fired important that you were both willing to risk losing your jobs over it?”

“I was late,” Kristin said in a small voice.

The way she said it, Joanna knew at once she wasn’t talking about being late for work. “A whole week,” Kristin continued after a pause. “And that’s not me. I’m one of those women who’s as regular as clockwork-every twenty-eight days.”

Joanna felt her eyes widen. “You mean to tell me you’re pregnant?” Kristin nodded miserably. “What happened? Weren’t you using birth control?”

Kristin nodded again as two fat tears spilled out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “We were,” she replied. “Condoms. But something must have happened to one of them. I couldn’t talk to my mother-she’d have a fit-so I was planning to talk to you about it on Sunday, after the shower, to ask your advice. But then Dick Voland showed up and I lost my nerve. So I talked to a friend instead. She gave me the name of a doctor down in Agua Prieta who would take care of it for me, but…” At that point, Kristin buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

Joanna took a deep breath. It was déjà vu all over with a painful piece of her own life. She remembered all too well when she had been in Kristin’s shoes in a similar situation; when she, after agonizingly considering whether or not to have an abortion, had finally been forced to tell Andy that she, too, was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted to and had delayed for weeks, hoping she was wrong. Part of her reason for not wanting to tell was due to the fact that she and Andy had barely begun dating. She hadn’t wanted him to feel trapped into marrying her, but as soon as he found out, he had insisted. He and Joanna had run off to Lordsburg, New Mexico, the very next weekend, to tie the knot.

And the knot had worked. Theirs hadn’t been a trouble-free marriage, but it had been a good one. They had been in love and they had stayed that way. Together they had been happy. The only person who had seemed seriously offended by Jenny’s early arrival had been Eleanor Lathrop, who had, as it turned out, her own long-hidden and hypocritical reasons for being opposed to shotgun weddings.

With a jolt, Joanna emerged from an instant replay of her own past with the sudden realization that reliving the misery of her own experience was doing nothing to alleviate Kristin Marsten’s.

“She wasn’t even going to tell me,” Terry Gregovich was saying. “I could tell all last week that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. I thought we’d get a chance to talk about it over the weekend, but then I had to work all day Sunday. Yesterday morning, I called her here at work. I told her I knew something was up, and if she wouldn’t meet me to tell me what it was, that I’d come here to her office and I wouldn’t leave until I knew where I stood.” He paused. “I was afraid there was somebody else and that she wanted to break up with me.

“So I told her I was picking up some burgers at the Arctic Circle and that she should meet me down at Vista Park. It was while we were there that she finally broke down and told me what was up. I asked her if she knew for sure. She said no, she only thought so. That’s when I told her, we can’t go around making decisions in the dark and that we had to have her tested so we’d know what was what. She didn’t want to go to a doctor here in town or in Sierra Vista because she was afraid someone would talk. And she didn’t want to get one of those pregnancy test kits from the drugstore for the same reason. So yesterday afternoon, I turned off my pager and we drove up to Tucson-to Planned Parenthood.”

“And?” Joanna prodded.

Kristin looked up through teary eyes and nodded. “It’s true,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

“So what are you going to do?” Joanna asked.

“It’s not how I wanted it to work out, Sheriff Brady,” Terry answered. “It’s not how either one of us wanted it. But I love Kristin, and she loves me, and both of us want this baby. So if you have to fire one of us, go ahead. You can have my resignation right now. If I go up to Tucson I can probably find another job that will pay as well or better than this one. If I’m going to be a husband and a father in the next little while, you’d better believe I’m going to take those responsibilities seriously.”

Having said that, he reached out for Kristin’s hand and held it tenderly, cradled between both of his.

“So what’s the plan then?” Joanna asked. “Are you going to tell your parents?”

“I suppose,” Kristin said. “I don’t want to. Mother’s going to kill me. And then we’ll get married. I know my mother always wanted me to have a nice, big church wedding. So did I, but I guess we can’t do that now.”

“But we can, Kristin,” Terry objected. “Don’t you see? We can still have just the kind of wedding you want. There’s no law that says you can’t have a nice wedding and wear a long white dress if that’s what you want to do. We don’t have to go running off to some chapel in Vegas or to a Justice of the Peace somewhere. So what if it takes a month or two to put together a wedding? If there are people who stand around after the baby’s born, counting months and pointing fingers, then it’s their problem, not ours.”

Joanna nodded. “Terry’s right, Kristin. You can have as nice a wedding as you want.”

“But how?” Kristin asked tremulously. “Terry and I both work. Weddings take a lot of planning, and I know my mother. She’ll be so mad that she won’t lift a finger.” At that, Kristin once again burst into inconsolable sobs.

“If your mother won’t help us, mine will,” Terry said. “I know we can do it. It’ll work out, hon. I know it will. Don’t cry, please. We’ll be fine.”

Listening to him, he sounded so confident, so sure of himself, that Terry almost had Joanna convinced that it really would be fine.

“Is that what you want, Kristin?” Joanna asked kindly. “To marry Terry and keep the baby?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “but how…”

“Do you attend church regularly?”

“I used to,” Kristin said, sniffling. “My parents go to Cornerstone out in Sierra Vista. I tried it a few times, but I didn’t like it.”

Cornerstone in Sierra Vista was a nondenominational megachurch made up of disaffected evangelicals from many denominations who had coalesced into a separate church of their own. Cornerstone’s fiery pastor had been in the news for first blocking and then physically assaulting an elderly man who, along with his wife, had parked in the church parking lot while attending a weekday luncheon at a nearby senior center. The assault charges were eventually dropped but the incident had left both church and pastor with an unfortunate reputation in the community.

Even Marianne had been constrained to comment, telling Joanna at one of their weekday luncheons, “Cornerstone is longer on judgment and hellfire and brimstone than it is on forgiveness and the milk of human kindness.” Joanna hoped, for Kristin’s sake, that the same didn’t hold true for the young woman’s parents.

Joanna turned to her deputy. “What about you, Terry?” she asked.

He shrugged. “The last time I went to church I think I was about seven years old.”

“So you’re telling me that you’d both like to have a church wedding but neither one of you has a specific church in mind. Is that right?”

Terry Gregovich nodded. “That’s about it,” he said.

Joanna pulled a piece of paper loose from one of several half-used tablets of Post-its and jotted down a telephone number. “This is Reverend Marianne Maculyea’s number up at Canyon United Methodist Church,” she said. “Marianne’s a good friend of mine, and she has a cool head on her shoulders. I’m sure she can help talk you through some of the decisions you both need to be making right now, the bottom line of which is-baby or no baby-do you really love one another enough to get married? Since Marianne doesn’t know either one of you, she should be a truly impartial observer. Then, who knows, if you do decide on a church wedding, maybe Canyon would be a good place to do it.”

Joanna passed the note across her desk. Kristin took it as if grabbing hold of a lifeline.

“Does that mean you’re not going to fire us?” Terry asked.

Joanna shook her head. “It sounds to me as if the two of you were dealing with a life-or-death situation yesterday. Under the circumstances, I wouldn’t call that a firing offense. A lot of people seem to think that police officers are cops first and people later. I happen to believe it’s the other way around. On the other hand, you’re not getting a walk. From now on, I expect your behavior to be above reproach. That goes for both of you. I know love is grand, but it isn’t supposed to infringe on work. No hanging around the office mooning at one another when you’re supposed to be out in the field, Deputy Gregovich. Do I make myself clear?”

“Absolutely. You can count on me, Sheriff Brady,” the deputy replied.

“And if you want to take time off together,” Joanna continued, “it has to be arranged in advance through proper channels. No more of this instant comp time or ”I feel a headache coming on, so I think I’ll go home.“ Understood, Kristin?”

The young woman nodded eagerly.

“Okay, then,” Joanna said, “it’s probably time we all went to work. Terry and Spike need to get over to Texas Canyon to help the Search and Rescue guys look for Lucinda Ridder. And I’m sure Kristin and I have a bale of incoming mail to handle. Right, Kristin?”

“Right.”

Kristin and Terry stood up together. So did Spike. “There’s one more thing I need to tell you,” Joanna said. “If anyone were to track down the records, you’d be able to see that, taking Andy’s and my wedding date into consideration, Jenny was born a lot sooner than she should have been. And since she weighed in at seven and a half pounds, we would have been hard-pressed to convince anyone that she was premature.”

Kristin Marsten caught her breath. “Sheriff Brady, you mean the same thing happened to you?”

“It happens to a lot of people, Kristin, and I’m here to tell you it’s not the end of the world. Talk to your parents about it. They just might surprise you.”

Nodding and holding hands, Kristin and Terry left Joanna’s office, closing the door behind them. Moments later there was a discreet knock.

“Come in,” Joanna called.

Frank Montoya poked his head around the door. “Time for the morning briefing?” he asked, waving a fistful of manila folders.

“Past time,” Joanna said. “Let’s get cracking.”

“I guess you didn’t have a chance to have that little chat with Deputy Gregovich and Kristin,” Frank suggested tentatively.

“But I did talk to them,” Joanna replied. “The two of them left my office just a few seconds ago.”

“Well,” Frank said. “It doesn’t appear that your talk did much good. You’d better give it another shot. When I came into the outer office just now, I caught them in the middle of a great big smooch. They broke it off, but they didn’t even have brains enough to look guilty about it.”

“Kristin Marsten and Deputy Gregovich aren’t guilty, Frank. They’re pregnant. They spent yesterday afternoon finding out for sure that it was more than just a late period and deciding whether or not to have an abortion. I think we can say Kristin was legitimately sick even if she wasn’t home when you went by to check. They were in Tucson seeing a doctor from Planned Parenthood.”

“Whoa! I’d guess that means you’re not going to fire them.”

“And I’d guess you’re right. I told them no more monkey business at work or during business hours, but we can probably overlook an engagement-launching smooch. Now let’s get down to business. What happened overnight?”

For the next forty-five minutes, Joanna and Frank went over the chief deputy’s usual collection of mundane stuff-incident reports, jail menus, scheduling and vacation approvals. None of it was critical, but it all had to be brought to Joanna’s attention.

“And here’s the information you wanted me to find,” Frank Montoya said when they had finally worked their way down to the last folder in his stack.

“What’s that?” Joanna asked.

“Faxes of the newspaper clippings on the Thomas Ridder shooting. I also found out why he got thrown out of the army. He decked a superior officer.”

“So at least he didn’t discriminate,” Joanna said.

Frank frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

“Most of the men who beat up their wives don’t have balls enough to pick on someone their own size who might hit back.”

“Maybe you’re the one who’s discriminating, Joanna,” Frank said. “Remember, the army discharged Thomas Ridder over whatever happened. Sandra Ridder’s solution put the guy away in a pine box-permanently. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it, but I am saying there may have been other possible solutions that Sandra Ridder never considered. And the judge who sent her up must have thought so, too, or he wouldn’t have given her eight to ten.”

“Point taken,” Joanna said with a sigh. “Anything else?”

“Ernesto poked his head in my office a little while ago and told me to tell you the water is from Tucson. He said you’d know what he meant, but I don’t.”

“The water in the jugs with no fingerprints,” Joanna supplied. “And if the water came from Tucson, the jugs probably did, too. Which means that whoever put them there wasn’t a UDA from Mexico walking south into the US of A to find field-hand work.”

“I see what you mean,” Frank said. “Most of the UDAs are walking north, not south. So what else is going on that I don’t know about?”

“Dr. Daly came down from Tucson yesterday and did Clayton Rhodes’ second autopsy.”

“And?”

“And nothing. She came up with the same results Doc Winfield did-cerebral hemorrhage.”

“That’s a relief then,” Frank said. “At least we won’t have to have the FBI snooping around here and sticking their noses into everybody’s business. I wasn’t looking forward to that.”

“Neither was I,” Joanna agreed.

“And we’ll also have Reba Singleton off our backs.”

“Right.”

Frank was up and on his way to the door when Joanna thought to ask him about Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal.

“They took off for Tucson first thing this morning,” Frank told her. “They had an appointment with Melanie Goodson. They were also going to take the slug that killed Sandra Ridder up to the Department of Public Safety satellite crime lab in Tucson. Why, do you have something for them?”

“I talked to Melanie Goodson myself yesterday afternoon,” Joanna said. “And I had the distinct impression that she wasn’t being forthright with me. She claims she was at home asleep when Sandra took off in her Lexus, but-despite having a telephone in her bedroom-she still claims she didn’t hear Lucy’s phone call when it came in around three a.m. She let the call be picked up by her machine.”

“What do you want Ernie and Jaime to do about it?”

“I want them to bear that in mind when they talk to her. And when they finish up with everything else, I want them to go out to Melanie’s neighborhood on Old Spanish Trail and check it out. There’s always a chance that one of her neighbors saw or heard something unusual.”

“There’s a chance,” Frank Montoya agreed. “But not a very big one. If I were you, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

The moment Frank left Joanna’s office, a much-relieved Kristin Marsten appeared with that day’s worth of correspondence. For Joanna, dealing with the daily deluge of mail was an unending source of frustration. She worked for two golden and almost totally uninterrupted hours before her private-line phone rang.

“I hope you’re happy,” Eleanor Lathrop said. “I don’t see how the Dixons could have felt very welcome when you and George and Frederick locked yourselves up in the kitchen that way. I suppose it could have been worse, though. If you had come outside and started discussing all those gruesome things…”

“Mother, look,” Joanna said. “This is a complicated week for all concerned. It was wonderful of you and George to host last night’s dinner, and I’m sure everyone enjoyed it. Those tamales were incredible.”

“I’m glad you liked them,” Eleanor sniffed. “The food was all right, but the atmosphere was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. Why, even Eva Lou was snappish with Maggie when she and Jim Bob were getting ready to leave.”

She was snappish a lot earlier than that, Joanna thought. I wonder what Maggie Dixon said that finally pushed even sweet-tempered Eva Lou over the edge?

Joanna’s unspoken question was never uttered aloud, but Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, chattering on, answered it anyway.

“All Maggie did was ask a few questions about Andy-nothing out of line as far as I could see, but all of a sudden Eva Lou stands up and says, ”I can’t imagine why you’d be asking such a personal question.“ It was an answer straight out of ”Dear Abby,“ and I was absolutely floored. Can you imagine Eva Lou being so… well…” Eleanor Winfield paused as she groped for the proper word. “So outspoken,” she finished at last.

When it comes to Maggie Dixon, Joanna told herself, anything is possible.